VMUG Meeting

As per usual it’s set to be a cracking day, we’re honored to be welcoming Chad Sakac on his inaugural visit to Scotland and if you’ve never seen him speak then you’re in for a treat. We’ve got our usual mix of awesome sponsor’s on the day and some fantastic first timer’s and returning favourites from VMware

Yet again we’ve got two VCDX’s attending so it’s all shaping up to be a memorable day and of course there’s a special vBeers planned for afterwards. If you haven’t registered yet…what are you waiting for?Registration

We will update the details as we get them so this blog page may change

Keynote – Chad Sakac – Pivotal

“Getting into fewer, smarter bar fights: a look at the debates that drag us down, and the dialogs that lift us up”

Sponsors –

IBM – How to Overcome the Challenges of moving VMware to the Cloud- Jim Mckay, IBM Cloud Solution Architect

Learn about the range of VMware offerings available on IBM Cloud including VCF with HXC. Demo will include live use of IBM cloud portal to deploy VMware cluster and will include overview of the many 3rd party offerings which can also be deployed.

Focussing on the Baillie Gifford’s recent VxRAIL implementation which is the first phase of their SDDC Strategic goal. You will get to understand the business objectives, the VxRail Stretched Cluster Deployment in all its phases, the criteria for success and how it was rigorously tested. Included will also be tips and tricks as well as lessons learned from deployment challenges encountered.

Zerto – Delivering IT Resilience in a Changing World – Nick Williams

– What is IT Resilience
– What changes are we seeing in the industry
– How an IT Resilience platform can help keep you on the right side of these.

vRealize Automation and NSX are both powerful tools in their own right, but together they really come alive. Based on real-world experience implementing micro-segmentation with vRealize Automation for all sorts of customers, learn the methods that work and how to avoid common mistakes. Compare out-of-the-box implementations with custom day-2 automation, and the challenges and benefits of both.

Matt Evans – To Re or not to Re(purpose) Desktops

The desktop market offers many desktop re-purposing solutions based on Windows, Linux and Chrome. In this session we will take a deep dive into those technologies, share our test results and present a comparison of the different vendor offerings to help you make an informed choice. Examples of our findings will cover costs, system requirements, performance, device management and limitations.

Robbie Jerrom – Cloud Native Apps Update

Coommunity –

AllanMcAleavy– Hunting noisy neighbours using VROPS & Grafana.

When hunting for noisy neighbour workloads from a high level storage viewpoint we can only drill down as far as an ESX Host or VMFS Volume. This initially led to the development of dashboards within VROPS to allow top-down (ESX Host to VM) and bottom-up (VMFS to VM) analysis to identify these workloads. This approach worked well however teams had to use different tools & different dashboards to correlate the data. In this talk I will show how we use the VROPS python API to gather I/O data and correlate this with array data using Grafana to hunt down noisy workloads from an ESX node and VMFS view. I will also show how we can use this methodology to Identify high CPU workloads and also help us look at overall ESX and VM performance using this data.

Sponsors –

At the recent meeting the Scottish VMUG Leaders introduced everyone to the Coommunity. The leaders encouraged attendees to speak to themselves and other members of the Coommunity (Colin Westwater, Craig Dalrymple and Martin Campbell) about taking part. It was nice to hear that some attendees did take up the challenge and actively seek out the members to talk to.

Here is some info to help bust those myths, for those looking to contribute.

Sorry it’s taken us so long to get a finalised agenda published. Conscious that it’s only 4 weeks until the VMUG we’ve decided to publish the agenda as we have it at the moment. This blog post will be a living document and will be updated as we get the other session extracts

Cormac Hogan – What’s happening in the world of VMware Storage
In my session, I plan to talk about the state of storage at VMware at moment, which includes talking about new features that you may not be aware of that are already in our products, as well as a sneak-peak at some things that “might” be appearing in some releases very soon. This will look at hyper-convergence improvements in vSAN since last year, where things are currently with VVols, an update on IO Filters, a look at core storage enhancements in vSphere 6.5, and some vision at what “might” be coming down the line. A lot of this will focus on how to leverage different data services from the different storage products for your VMs and workloads. I’ll also talk about some of the things we are doing in the persistent storage for containers, namely ‘Project Hatchway’.

Scottish VMUG – Glasgow April 26th 2018

We’re delighted to confirm the date for the next Scotland VMUG and it’ll be in Glasgow on Thursday April 26th.

Iain is always trying to convince me that Glasgow’s miles better, he’s obviously wrong. However on this occasion he has managed to find a fantastic venue for April. University of Strathclyde Technology and Innovation Centre; a venue that’s valid in both stature and purpose.

The directions i’ve been given are; it’s a 3 minute walk from Queen Street station, assuming that’s based on Iain and James’ little legs so only 90 seconds or so for Sandy and I.
More details on the venue are here; https://www.strath.ac.uk/conferencingandevents/venues/technologyinnovationcentre/

We’re working really hard to finalise speakers and sponsors, needless to say it’s going to be a cracking lineup and we’ll publish all details as soon as we can. As per always we’re looking for anyone community who’d like to participate in someway, please just contact one of the leaders and we can have a conversation about options.

This has been cross posted from my own blog vGemba.net. Go check it out!

On Thursday 26th October 2017 the second Scotland VMUG of the year happened. An amazing event!

There were 140 registered and I am sure there was well over 100 actually attended. Numbers seem to go from strength to strength and I am sure it’s due to the hard work the leaders do in securing great speakers and content. Three VCDX’s in one day? Yes please.

First up was Duncan Epping on “Evolution of vSAN”. First up he detailed the development of the product – 50x growth predicted from 2010 – 2020. Pretty impressive. We then saw some upcoming features in vSAN. These included:

Live view of disks in the server

LED blink on and off

Simplified cluster creation

Proactive support – vSAN calls home to VMware and GSS can call you

Snapshots will be better

1 – 2 minute VM recovery

The biggest thing mentioned for me was full stack upgrades coming. Using VUM you can perform complete firmware and driver updates of the entire server stack from BIOS up. This will certainly help me push vSAN over another product. Thanks Duncan!

We were very excited yesterday to announce the two keynote speakers for the Scottish VMUG in Edinburgh on October 26th, Duncan Epping and Chris Wahl.

Duncan Epping (VMware) – Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Storage & Availability BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007) and the author of multiple books including “Essential Virtual SAN” and the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deepdive” series. http://www.yellow-bricks.com/